that's how I live my life
In boxing, we do bag drills for three minutes at a stretch: one combination of punches aimed at a heavy bag, repeated over and over and goddamn over again, the same set repeated until the movements are worn into your muscles, your neural pathways-- until, I guess, you know it so well that even when you're shit-scared, under some kind of attack, your body will clench the right kind of fist, shift your weight, and throw the jab, the uppercut, another jab, the hook.
"This is how you get to know yourself," W said the other day, assigning us to a set late in the workout, when we were already noodle-y with exhaustion and heat. "Three minutes at a time."
A thing I've learned as a late-in-life jock bloomer is that most of the things people say about working out are weirdly easy to read as wise koans of some kind. Another favorite of the boxing coaches, W and M both, is that the goal of bag drills is to land your punches "heavy, not hard."
What they mean is that if you set up your body in the right way, the whole thing swings your fist into place: it's not just wrist, elbow, shoulder, but core rotating ribs, hip twisting, weight transferring foot to foot. Knees tracking ankles. The strongest punch isn't even exactly a swing. It's not about the arc of your arm as much as the weight of your whole body behind it. When you hit something like this, mostly what you feel is solid: how much force there is in you, how heavy your body really is.
I've been struggling with that: the heaviness. It's not how girls are supposed to want to feel about themselves. I've spent the last fifteen years doing yoga, always pulling some part of myself toward the sky, training my legs and arms to lift themselves neatly and obediently off the ground no matter where they are in relation to it. As if they were weightless. As if having a body was just an easy, elegant thing.
"You're hitting like a beast," W said to me at the end of class the other day.
"I am a beast," I said, and then I thought everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster, and I didn't know how to feel about that.
The thing about the three minutes is that he actually means it literally. If you're in a fight, a real one or sparring in the ring, you need to know how much you can physically handle. You need to know, when your brain thinks you're exhausted, exactly how much your muscles have left. It's really just learning to pace yourself. W is not trying to teach us any kind of lessons about how to be in the world. He's just trying to get us to behave ourselves in the goddamn gym.
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I wrote about some EXTREMELY me shit for The New Republic: on why everyone needs to stop pretending Eve Babitz has anything to do with Didion, and recognize that her one true heiress is Francesca Lia Block.
Speaking of which, did you read the last piece I wrote for them? It was about Alanna Massey, Sady Doyle, and creating a canon of feminist history by writing about ourselves and the women we love and loathe in pop culture.
Book news: The Today Show, via Emma Straub, says GRACE AND THE FEVER is a "perfect book for your long weekend"!!! I mean we're out of long weekends until Labor Day rolls around but there are many regular weekends, and maybe some vacation days, and whatever, read my book, read my book read my book read my book.
Vox also thinks it's pretty good.
I suggest reading it in Ojai if that's remotely practical for you-- I wrote for Healthyish about a bunch of other fun stuff to see, eat, and do while you're there.
And finally, speaking of long weekends, I spent part of the most recent one chatting to the incredibly sweet women of Talk Direction, and you can hear that interview here, plus me on "my creative process," whatever tf that is, at Your Creative Push.